Two Million Added to ObamaCare Group of Uninsured This Year

The media have made a big deal out of the fact that about two million people have been added to the group of people with no health insurance this year.  Examples of coverage are in Time, CNN, and the NYT.  When commentators talk about this decrease in coverage on TV, they try to pin responsibility on Trump and the GOP, when in fact it is due to problems with ObamaCare.  All of these print articles point out that the reason for the decline is that millions of young, healthy people are leaving ObamaCare, because it’s a bad deal.  ObamaCare counted on young, healthy people’s insurance payments to subsidize coverage for older people with higher medical expenses.  Younger people are apparently deciding that it’s better to pay the ObamaCare tax penalty than to buy the ObamaCare insurance.  

This phenomenon is to some extent evidence that the Republicans are right.  If left alone, ObamaCare will self-destruct.  

Echoes of Old Anti-Communists Days

Joe McCarthy & Roy Cohn

The current hearings of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence look ominously like the 1950s  hearings of the House Unamerican Activities Committee and the hearings led by Senator Joe McCarthy in the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations.  Ironically, McCarthy’s chief lawyer, Roy Cohn, was a mentor to President Donald Trump early in his business career.  

The current committees are seeking connections to Russian spies, while their predecessors in the 1940s and 1950s were seeking connections to Communist spies.  In the Senate today Senator Mark Warner is playing the role of Joe McCarthy, screaming treason and treachery at the top of his voice.  Today Congressman Adam Schiff is playing the role of Congressman Richard Nixon in pursuit of Alger Hiss for spying, as reported by the Washington Post.  

Roles are reversed.  Now it’s Democrats who see Russian spies under every rock, spies so powerful they can turn an ordinary American like Donald Trump, Jr., into a traitor, simply by being the the same room with him for a meeting. The Democrats portray Rinat Akhmetshin as just such a man.  Strangely for such a powerful spy, Akhmetshin is a US citizen and lobbyist, who meets regularly with American politicians without turning them into traitors.  

I think the hearings are ridiculous, just like the old 1040s and 1950s anti-Communist hearings.  Their pursuit of Russian spies is a kangaroo court or a “witch hunt” as President Trump has said.  The Democrats are profoundly embarrassed by having lost an election that should have been an easy victory because of their gross incompetence and contempt for the electorate.  Now the Democrats are trying to blame the Russians for the failures of the Democratic Party.  They are so obsessed that slander and persecution are acceptable tools to an end.  They are disgracing themselves a second time and befouling the halls of Congress in the process.  

Hillary’s and Donald’s Emails

The media are going mad about a handful of emails from and to Donald Trump Junior.  It’s not clear that the emails are incriminating, although the Democrats and the media are doing everything than can to make them sound incriminating.  When the New York Times printed the emails in question, it printed seventeen.  On the other hand, Hillary Clinton’s staff destroyed 33,000 emails after they had been subpoenaed by Congress.  Hillary’s staff actually ordered that they emails be destroyed before they were subpoenaed, but they were not physically destroyed until after the subpoena had been issued.  Hillary claimed the emails were personal, but we will never know because no one who was not working for or with Hillary ever saw them.  This is the time line by Politifact:  

At the second debate between the two presidential nominees, Trump criticized Clinton for turning over half her emails held on her server to the State Department and deleting the rest. He said Clinton should be "ashamed" of herself for deleting 33,000 emails.

Clinton and her campaign don’t dispute that she deleted these 33,000 emails. They argue that these were personal in nature, rather than work-related, and therefore were not necessary to turn over.

Politifact’s ruling was:

Trump said, "You (Hillary Clinton) get a subpoena, and after getting the subpoena you delete 33,000 emails."

Clinton’s staff received a subpoena for Benghazi-related emails March 4. An employee managing her server deleted 33,000 of Clinton’s emails three weeks later.

The FBI found no evidence that the emails were deleted deliberately to avoid the subpoena or other requests. Clinton’s team requested for the emails to be deleted months before the subpoena came. They also argued that all the emails that would be relevant to the subpoena had already been turned over to the State Department.

We rate Trump’s claim Half True.

While Trump Junior is being pilloried in the press for seventeen emails, it is useful to remember that Hillary deleted 33,000, and we will never know what they said.  Since Hillary was Secretary of State, some of them may have involved conversations with Russians.  Sen. Tim Kaine has said that Trump Junior may have committed treason by talking to Russians for a few minutes.  Is it not likely that Hillary talked to Russians much more than Trump did, and that she talked about more important subjects, making it more likely that she would have committed treason by Kaine’s standard (not by any real definition of treason).  .  .  

Trump Junior Emails

The media has gone wild over the Trump emails obtained by the New York Times, and then released by Trump Junior himself.  How did the NYT obtain these emails?  If they came from intelligence sources, they illustrate the violations of the Fourth Amendment by the intelligence community that led Ed Snowden to defect to Russia.  Of course, once Trump himself released the emails, their veracity is confirmed, but where did the NYT get them in the first place?  Did someone violate Donald Junior’s Fourth Amendment rights?  Is the NYT not concerned about violations of the Fourth Amendment?  It has repeatedly relied on its protection under the First Amendment.  Is one amendment more important than the other?  

It’s interesting that liberal journalists across the board have no concern about reading other people’s emails.  A hundred years ago reading someone else’s mail was a very bad thing to do.  Someone who did it would have been considered an immoral, impolite voyeur.  Today there is no concern about reading other people’s mail.  The talking heads delight in it and feel no shame.  President Trump is certainly boorish and impolite, but so are the talking heads who criticize him.  A pox on both your houses.  

I found it interesting that on “Andrea Mitchell Reports” Sen. Tim Kaine said Americans were deployed to fight the Russians, and because of that confrontation, what Donald Trump, Jr., did was potentially treason.  Since the penalty for treason is death, Kaine presumably believes that Trump Junior should die for meeting with a Russian lawyer.  

The Trump discussions look like nothing compared with the Reagan campaign’s negotiations with the Iranians to help Reagan defeat Carter in 1980.  See this report in the Washington Report on Middle Eastern Affairs.  Although most of these negotiations were secret, the Iranian release of the Iranian hostages the moment after Reagan took the oath of office was very public.  Compared to Reagan, Trump is as pure as the driven snow.